Latest revision as of 02:11, 1 April 2012

Flymake is a on-the-fly syntax checker for Emacs. It works by running a
preconfigured syntax check tool in the background, processing the tool's
output and highlighting errors in the current Buffer. The most common
use is to check computer programs for errors, although flymake can be
configured to use any program for checking the contents of a buffer.

The Flyspell mode provides a similar functionality for spellchecking
a document on the fly.

Using flymake with the C programming language requires some
setup. Flymake expects a Makefile in
the current directory. The Makefile is required to have a target named
"check-syntax". Thus a minimal Makefile for getting flymake to work
could look like this:

.PHONY: check-syntax
# depending on the compiler, -fsyntax-only has to be
# replaced by another option
check-syntax:
$(CC) -fsyntax-only $(CHK_SOURCES)